A Turning Point for Touch Screens, Says the NYT

The New York Times has a story up on the suddenly brisk market for touch screens and the devices which can make use of them, which it says "has grown quietly for years, both in commercial applications and in consumer devices." Besides the obvious (the iPhone, and Apple's use of multi-touch generally), the article also mentions the recent inclusion of Israeli company N-Trig's version of multi-touch technology in a Dell notebook computer, and some of the other places you can expect to see touchscreens instead of display-only ones in the near future — if the price drops quickly enough.

Comments

If sci fi movies are anything to go by..

[predder]

Forget the optimus, what about a touch screen keyboard? Sure, there's no feedback (yet) but the user could change the input style at will, using it as a mouse/tablet/music mixing device etc.

Re:If sci fi movies are anything to go by..

[Anonymous Coward]

art lebedev actually has a concept of one, the optimus tactus. Check it out - http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/

Re:If sci fi movies are anything to go by..

[ColdWetDog]

Feedback is really important, but maybe it can be faked.

Of course feedback can be faked ... ask any woman.

I'm surprised that consumers want them...

[mykepredko]

I was the design manager on Logitech's Harmony One remote and I fought for a touch screen for the programmable controls - in the past these were physical buttons beside the different controls on the remote. Implementing physical buttons close to an LCD are very difficult to implement correctly. I thought the touch panel would improve the quality of the product and give it much cleaner look to the overall product.

I was half right - it is a gorgeous remote but the touch panel just doesn't match the rest of the remote and the time taken in the mechanical design to product an interface that you don't have to look down at to use. Coupled with the cost of the capacitive touch panel (about 10x what it would cost for poly dome and plastic/elastomer buttons) it really isn't worth it.

I'm very unimpressed with the touch panel for typing on the iPhone and iPod touch so I'm going to be watching to see how companies design their user interfaces to give users as positive an interface as they would have with buttons.

If it's not done well, then I would expect a backlash against touch panels by consumers.

myke

Re:I'm surprised that consumers want them...

[clarkkent09]

I'm very unimpressed with the touch panel for typing on the iPhone and iPod touch

Hmm, do you type on one of those regularly?

Yes, the physical typing experience on iPhone is pretty poor, but I find that the auto correction software pretty much makes up for it. I can type just about as fast on iPhone as on another small keyboard with physical buttons, and even though I make horrible typing errors it fixes them on the fly perfectly almost every time. You just have to trust it, just like it says in the video. On the other hand I do sometimes type in another language which is not supported by iphone (Serbian) and the result is a mess. But as long as you are typing regular text (not a lot of names or code or something) in a supported language, the software can go a long way to make use of it on a daily basis fairly bearable. On the other hand, there are considerable advantages in size, weight, flexibility etc in having the keyboard on the screen as needed so perhaps it's worth getting used to it.

Re:I'm surprised that consumers want them...

[Z00L00K]

And whenever there is a touch panel it will also be clogged by the dirty fingers people have.

Just take a look at some people's keyboards where a large amount of brownish residue of unknown origin is accumulated.

Many remotes also have an accumulation of some residue that you probably don't want to examine further, and by having a touch display you will get that residue even more visible.

How will this effect porn?

[unlametheweak]

Touch screens should re-vitalize computer based porn. Think of the possibilities.

The DS?

[Sockatume]

I imagine that the first prolonged, day-to-day experience with a touchscreen for a lot of people would be the Nintendo DS. It's got a user base a lot larger, and demographically wider, than that of the iPhone. This isn't to knock Apple's tech and design achievements with that device and their trackpads, but I think the DS was probably pivotal in getting the general public used to operating devices with purely virtual buttons.

Not a single mention of the DS...

[distantbody]

More innovative than the iPhone and yet they didn't even mention it in the article...

What Apple should do.

[suck_burners_rice]

Right, so here's my incredibly important opinion that you must agree with. Apple implemented this nifty multi-touch thing on the iPhone (and consequently on the iPod Touch). What they need to do now is extend this multi-touch thing to the computers as well. Heck, if I can see some darn thing on the screen and I want to drag it around or whatever, why shouldn't I be able to just reach out and do that? There should still be a keyboard and a rat for now. Mouse pads should also incorporate multi-touch. I think the keys on the keyboard should all have tiny displays embedded in them that can display any character. Thus, when you switch languages, the keyboard mapping will change and the keys themselves will show what character they'll type. Push Ctrl, Alt, Fn, Open-Apple, Shift, or whatever, and the keys will immediately change to reflect the characters that will be typed. Thus, lowercase letters will be displayed until Shift is held down, at which point they'll change to uppercase and the number keys will change to the symbols on those same keys. Hit Caps Lock and the appropriate behavior will take place. No more people getting confused why their password isn't being accepted or pushing all kinds of wrong keys looking for that dang ñ key when you're typing in Spanish or whatever. Simple. So, where were we? Oh yeah. Take these computers to the next level. Multi-touch on all computer displays and mouse pads. Keyboards where individual keys display what they will do. And while we're at it, how about a non-broken X implementation like there used to be in Tiger?!?